1. Field of the Invention
This invention pertains generally to compression of digital and analog signals and data, and more particularly to compression of time-bandwidth product utilizing a transformation stage imparting a reshaping that includes nonlinear warping of the temporal waveform.
2. Description of Related Art
Various forms of analog and digital data proliferate the modern age, making compression techniques a key technology to aid in the processing, communication and storage of these forms of data. A wide variety of approaches have been applied for the efficient collection and compression of analog and digital data.
Analog and digital data compression takes many forms, typically configured for reducing data redundancies or using lossless arithmetic coding techniques in digital data. Examples of digital data compression include, PKZIP, PNG, LZW and so forth.
Another category of data comprises temporal signals which must be sampled at a sufficient rate so as to obtain desired signal information, and then communicate/store that data efficiently. One existing mechanism for reaching a sufficient sampling rate involves time-stretching to trade off intensity-bandwidth and temporal-duration, thus allowing sampling to be performed at a lower rate while proportionally increasing the temporal duration. Time-stretching performed in the analog domain prior to sampling reduces signal bandwidth, but does not reduce the time-bandwidth product (TBP) because the signal is temporally stretched in time, whereby storage requirements remain constant.
Current data compression techniques operate on digital data only. However, in high speed sensors and instruments, the analog data is often too fast to be digitized in real time. One exception in the prior art is that compressive sensing operates on analog data, although it does not lend itself to fast real-time implementation.
Accordingly, a need exists for an enhanced data compression apparatus and method which reduces modulation intensity bandwidth otherwise known as envelope-bandwidth without a proportional increase in temporal duration.